


Crack in the Concrete

by MercuryMapleKey



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Animated (2007)
Genre: Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Mutation, Past Relationship(s), season four
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-19
Updated: 2015-06-19
Packaged: 2018-04-05 04:39:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4166220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryMapleKey/pseuds/MercuryMapleKey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sooner or later the past catches up to you. It doesn't matter who you are or what you've become.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crack in the Concrete

“Everyone! Get down!”

               The blast hit with the high shearing sound of hot energy through concrete and the crackle of electrical residue in the air. The screeching that came with it was organic, mangled and furious, saturated in the thick static of a split vocaliser and laced with something that could have frozen the energon lines of even the toughest of mechs. It wasn’t just unnatural; it was familiar. There were far too many things about their newest enemy that was familiar.

               Ironhide hit the ground hard with a protective arm over Bumblebee and his silver alloy plating taking the brunt of the rubble that fell on top of them. They were safe as long as they were out of sight, but Bumblebee had already taken a beating and didn’t need another. Ironhide pushed the mini’s protesting helm back down along the line of debris before the techno-organic could spot him. He needed time to think.

               They were calling him Waspinator. He called himself Waspinator. He had green stripes, a fractured mouthguard, and a serious grudge against Bumblebee and wanted him slagged, or offline, or worse. There was almost no way that was a coincidence.

               “Oh, Bumble-bot!” His voice broke through the haze of dust in a monstrous remake of a singsong drawl. Waspinator peered through the destruction of downtown Detroit, huge and hunkered, and interested in only one bot in the galaxy. “Come out, Bumble-bot!” They hadn’t been able to get him out of the city limits before he’d destroyed several blocks of it. People were hurt.

               There was something dangerously surreal about the whole thing, he almost didn’t believe what he was seeing. Almost. Unfortunately Ironhide had gotten his fair share of weird since he’d been assigned to Optimus’ team, and when it came to Earth the worst was the truth more often than not.

               Waspinator had never been a traitor, or so he kept shouting, but he was wearing a Decepticon symbol all the same. One megacycle ago Ironhide hadn’t even known he was _alive_ – if it was him, and somehow he couldn’t quite convince himself that it wasn’t him – and now the questions had piled up so high that he stopped trying to answer them altogether. Right now, Waspinator was dangerous, and years of training didn’t leave room for questions in the middle of the battlefield. Not to say he wasn’t glad that Optimus and Jazz recovered quickly enough to take the offensive first with a flanking maneuver; they didn’t have half a building on top of them.

               Not to mention the burning notion that he’d been left intentionally in the dark.

               Bumblebee had gotten himself injured, either in the fall or before it. Ironhide didn’t notice until he’d grabbed the mini to pull him out of the remains of the wreckage and away from the fight, and he didn’t care just yet even after that. Confusion, shock, horror, all of it had passed through in a continuous litany since Waspinator had landed, and all of it had filtered itself under the circumstances into a very specific shade of anger. Which he pointed directly at the only bot who could give him an answer at the moment: Bumblebee.

               “So,” They were having a talk. Right now. “When did you suppose you were gonna let me in on what happened to Wasp?”

It _was_ Wasp, he knew it was Wasp, and the look that lanced through Bee’s optics as he asked it only confirmed that it was Wasp. What Ironhide needed to know was what had happened, and why everyone had been surprised by the attack alone and not by the fact that it was mutant half-organic bug _thing_ that had attacked them. It was… He didn’t know what it was, this wasn’t anything he wanted to think about.

               But here he was, and neither Bumblebee’s guilty laughter nor his wince as his busted leg touched the ground did anything to assuage the situation. “Oh. That. Hahah, I guess it just slipped my mind, you know?” Bee tried a grin and it didn’t just look stretched. “No big deal, big guy.”

               No big deal. Because apparently _this_ had become the norm around Earth. Just one nightmare of a throwback after the next. Ironhide liked Bee, he really did, they got along, but some days the mech was just asking to get locked in a supply closet again. He wasn’t going to do it however, he didn’t have the time.

               And not a single one of them had told him anything about this.

               There wasn’t much time to press the issue before another blast of energy shattered the air around them for a second time. Bumblebee flinched, Ironhide grimaced, and Optimus went crashing into the building across from them. But Jazz was faster and Waspinator had no time to press the advantage. Both gangling green arms were forfeit, but whether that was due to Jazz knocking them off Waspinator himself or them dropping away on their own accord was hard to tell. The ninja had a way of making his moves look effortless, but Waspinator looked like he was tearing apart at the seams. Either way the screech that accompanied his lost limbs was enough to curl steel.

               That was it. It was over after that. Waspinator grabbed his loose arms and flew off still spitting curses and threats to a Bumblebee he couldn’t find, and with half of the team injured there was no chase to give. Apparently Sari had once had a key that could fix a bot up right quick, but those days were long gone. They’d have to head back to base and regroup, not to mention dealing with local authorities over property damage again. And this time there was a lot of it.

               Waspinator wasn’t a problem that was going to take himself away. Nor should he have been. He’d been wronged by the entire Autobot cause, imprisoned wrongfully, abandoned by the very system every bot put their trust and spark into. And his friends…  It seemed like the whole galaxy had remembered Wasp at the same time, in one moment he’d been an escaped convict, at large and highly dangerous. In the next he’d become an innocent victim, framed by Shockwave, the real Decepticon spy.

               Everyone had believed Shockwave’s lies. Ironhide had too.

               At the time he’d thought Wasp’s innocence had been a lot of information to take in. Now he didn’t know what to think at all, but a break in the fighting meant he could press for answers. Again Ironhide turned to Bumblebee, pointing with a glare in the direction that Waspinato— _Wasp_ had left.

               “What slipped your mind about _that_?”

               Bumblebee shook his helm and refocused on his teammate, immediately annoyed. “Look, I forgot you two used to know each other, alright? It’s not exactly like we were best friends or anything!” His leg was locked up and sparking, he wouldn’t be able to make it back to base on it alone. Ironhide knew he should’ve regretted grabbing him so harshly before, but he wasn’t there yet. The pulse of his spark reverberated in his energon lines instead in an angry hum.

               “Fine.” Blunt as a hammer and soft as steel, Ironhide crossed his arms over his chest and didn’t let up for an instant. “Tell me now.”  No one had gotten enough information on Wasp’s case the first time around. He wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.

               It wasn’t fair of him, but that wasn’t the issue right now.

Bumblebee opened his mouth and faltered, he frowned, glared, and then opened his mouth again. Fortunately Optimus answered instead, cradling his aching helm in one servo as he shuffled over from his own crash site with Jazz close behind him.

               “After Wasp broke out of the stockades he came directly to Earth to act on his grudge against Bumblebee. By then we knew he was innocent, but any attempts to inform Wasp of that fact proved ineffective and he ran off.” Optimus rattled off the facts like he was giving a report, straight and to the point, and Jazz nodded along beside him like he’d been there. Maybe he had. Which meant Ironhide was once again the last on the uptake.

Optimus continued: “Before we could bring him back however he was picked up by—“ And here he faltered. “By another techno-organic, Blackarachnia. She’s the one who turned him into...”

               “A giant bug monster?” Bee was as helpful as ever.

               “Yes. That. We thought they’d both been lost to an explosion, but now we need to catch Waspinator if we want to have any chance at rehabilitating him, and before he hurts himself or anyone else. He’s _very_ unstable in his current condition. He can’t stay like that.”

               So now he was up to speed. Ironhide didn’t know what to think about all of that, he didn’t know what else he could have expected either. Wasp had stopped being a concern of his vorns ago, Ironhide wasn’t one to hang around for a Decepticon spy, and even when the charges were dropped it had been too late. He’d been gone. Now Wasp was a mutant and a monster, and for the first time it felt like he really might be gone. They’d been close, sure, but they had hardly been inseparable.

               He wanted someone to blame for that.

               “You all knew, what kept you from tellin’ me?”

               There was a sympathy in Optimus’ words that went beyond the call of a Prime and his teammate. “I’m sorry Ironhide. I read Wasp’s file but there was nothing in it to suggest anyone had been close to him.”

               No well there wouldn’t have been. Ironhide nodded, once, twice; there was a lot of information that needed to be processed here, and a lot more that he’d never be able to get to. The facts filtered in slowly regardless. Wasp _was_ that techno-organic monster, that’s just the way things were. For now, at least. Optimus said that they could help him.

               “Why does he have it out for Bee?” He asked the first coherent question that came to mind. Wasp had always had a grudge against Bumblebee for one reason or another. Always. Showing up Bee had been one of Wasp’s biggest driving forces back in boot camp, but the sheer amount of hate in Waspinator’s voice – or what had been left of it – had been something else entirely. That wasn’t just a grudge.

               It wasn’t. And Bumblebee had the answer again, after a stern look from his Prime, twisting his fingers together awkwardly and trying to laugh the tense air away. “We-ell… remember how I was the one, well I mean _Longarm_ was the one who convinced _me_ to maybe sort of out Wasp as the traitor I thought he was? Which totally wasn’t _my_ fault by the way, like I said to Wasp, we’re _all_ the victims here.”

               He _hadn’t_ remembered that. Ironhide hadn’t remembered much of that decacycle at all actually. Either way it didn’t matter. Wasp believed that he only had Bumblebee to blame for his imprisonment, and by the looks of it he’d never stop hunting the mini down on his own. Time was up, and Ironhide made his decision.

               “I’m gonna go talk to him.”

Jazz raised an optic ridge from under his visor and let out a low whistle. “Mech, are you sure that’s a good idea? He did just 86 half the street, and that was just for makin’ contact with us.”

               And he wasn’t going to get the chance to try it again. With a definitive cross of his arms Ironhide made his challenge. “Has anyone tried it yet?”

               Not like this. Not without Bumblebee.

               At least this time he could try to set things right again.

               It should have been easier to track down a bug the size of Waspinator than it actually was. After everything had come to light Ironhide had realised that he had no idea if anything he’d known about Wasp had ever been true. That had been a hit a thousand years ago, now he couldn’t even be sure how much of Wasp was left in there. Waspinator had been so fixated on Bumblebee, he hadn’t seen anything else around him. He hadn’t seen anyone else. That’s the laser-like focus that they were counting on from Waspinator again this time. Maybe Ironhide could talk him into a surrender or a ceasefire, but if he couldn’t backup wasn’t going to be far away. Ironhide hoped he wouldn’t have to use it.

               He kept looking. A sound, a sighting, a— a wing. Purple and veined and sticking out from behind a curve in the road. They were far enough away from the city, on backroads where the potholed streets trailed slowly in the direction of the lake. Ironhide transformed and when he did Waspinator flipped around immediately from where he’d been trying to reattach the one of his arms back onto his frame. He’d been muttering under his breath before. He was only staring now, purple optics trained on Ironhide’s frame like he was seeing him for the first time, like they hadn’t just been trading blows less than a megacycle ago. Back in the city Wasp’s frame had been unsettling, but now that they were face to face it was something else entirely.

               It took a full klik of unnerving chirring and staring and twitching wings and mandibles before Waspinator managed his words again. The cogs were turning, Ironhide could see them working, but he couldn’t tell what to expect. It wasn’t what he got.

               Wasp pulled his helm forward on his thick organic neck, pushed it back again, and turned away completely, hunched low on his pedes. “Waspinator doesn’t want to see traitors. Go away.” His attention went back to his loose arm, mechanical and yet oozing from the shoulder with something that was not. Ironhide unclenched the fist he hadn’t known he’d been holding.

               Well, at least Wasp hadn’t forgotten who he was.

               “Wasp, wait, I gotta talk to you—“ Ironhide reset his vocaliser and started towards the mutant regardless, but Waspinator’s hairline patience was at its end.

“No!” He whirled around again growling and spitting, wings spread wide and frame puffed up to an intimidating display. “Back off! Stay away from Waspinator!” They were close enough now that it was easy to see just how far the organic part ran in him. From the coarse hairs that protruded from where sloped shoulders had been to the crooked veins that splayed out across waxy wings. Even from his stooped position Waspinator was enormous. He dwarfed the landscape around him, he was the stuff of sparkling horror stories; Ironhide curled his servo back into a fist and went nowhere.

               Back in the countryside of Luna 2 a mech had to get used to living around the wildlife. It was different, to be sure: Waspinator was organic, Waspinator wasn’t an animal, but he sure was acting like one. Ironhide could see the signs. Tired from the earlier fight and acting on the defensive, the techno-organic bristled his plating and tensed whatever struts or sinews or joints remained in his legs, like a turbofox backed into a corner. Another slow step forward sent a warning blast to the left of Ironhide’s helm. The conducted heat bloomed on his cheek and dissipated just as fast. It wasn’t too close.

He kept himself steady. He kept himself determined. “I’m not scared of you Wasp.”

Waspinator chirred a clicking beat. His optics were bright, threatening, familiar. His voice wasn’t. “Ironhide should be.” 

“Well I’m not.” Stubborn. But he had to be, Wasp had never listened to anyone he thought he could push around. “And I’m not leaving just yet. Not before I get to talk to you.”

”Back off!” Waspinator riled again and his clicking cry went up an octave. “Waspinator won’t talk! Waspinator gives nothing! Waspinator hates Ironhide!” Of all things it was his arm that Waspinator chucked at him, disjointed and oozing. It bounced off Ironhide’s guarding forearms and landed on the ground, twitching and twisting on its own. He didn’t dwell on it.

               In the end, an arm wasn’t the worst thing a bot could have thrown at them, right?

               “It’s fine Wasp.” Steady servos, slow speech. “You don’t have to give me anything. You can hate me.” It wasn’t fine, it left Ironhide feeling like he’d swallowed a gallon of lead. Wasp’s awkwardly large frame stiffened with anger and heaved with organic ventilations, stilted by a frustration he couldn’t vocalise. It wasn’t fine, but it wasn’t unfounded, or surprising, or even unreasonable either. Ironhide kept his voice steady and tried to remember that it wasn’t about him.

               They had been friends once, they had history. It didn’t have to end there. This time there was something he could do about things. Even if Wasp wasn’t quite just a bot anymore.

“I can still help you, you just gotta hear me out.”

               “Help!” Waspinator laughed. It had to be a laugh; heaving and bubbling and grating. It was otherworldly, he almost sounded like a quint. Ironhide had never been one to toss his energon cookies easily, but the shudder down his backstruts was unavoidable.

               “Help.” Waspinator repeated the word and his wings buzzed behind him in a flicker. “Ironhide is a thousand stellar cycles too late to help! Ironhide is a traitor just like the rest of them, left Wasp to rust, left Wasp for scrap, and now Waspinator picks up the pieces!” His tone crescendoed like an animal ready to charge, like a mech fueled on a fury he couldn’t contain. He was both; Wasp was still in there, somewhere, past the nightmarish frankenstein mutations.  

               Wasp was the one spitting truth like fire.

               It was his farm training more than his military that held Ironhide in a firm yet unthreatening stance. He was a steel wall when he needed to be, he always was, but words came a lot harder than actions. And what could he say in response to that? Wasp wasn’t wrong.

               “Look Wasp, I know you—“

               He didn’t get the chance. Waspinator lunged at him and they went sprawling. Sent to the ground with Ironhide’s helm connecting hard with the ground, at nearly three times the size and two times the power it only took one arm to pin the Autobot fast.

               “No Ironhide doesn’t!” Wasp roared outright, striped glossa curling around fuzzy dentae. “Ironhide knows nothing, did nothing! When they took Wasp to stockades where was Ironhide? What did Ironhide do? Nothing!” His ventilations were warm but wet with the smell of something decayed. And close. Way too close.

               The blows came and Ironhide expected them, Waspinator’s servo twisted into a crude fist as he whaled on the thick armour of Ironhide’s chest. Frantic, furious, Wasp was growling and buzzing from an endless well of vitriol – but he wasn’t fighting like a beast this time, not like he had been in the city; he was fighting like a bot in hysterics. Wasp had always had sloppy form when he let himself run on emotions. A punch to the jaw knocked the insecticon off balance, and a couple more to the chest and neck was enough to throw them both apart again.

               He was dented in more than a few places, Ironhide could tell that without the diagnostic report. He didn’t need backup. Ironhide waved off the comms insisting as to such and picked himself back off the ground to square his shoulders at the insecticon towering over him now. Wasp wasn’t the quick little mini he had been, but was enough. He could do this on his own.

               “Alright Wasp. If you wanna brawl, we’ll brawl.” Some languages were universal. Ironhide had been angry since the day he’d found out Longarm had set everything up, Wasp had gone mad in the stockades. He shrugged. “But I gotta wonder, what would you have done?”  They were figuring this out. Now, because he wasn’t letting some Con get away with all the damage he’d done. Now, whether Waspinator was going to listen to him or not. Absolutely right now. “What would you have done if I’d been the one they called a spy? Would you’da believed me?”

               Of course he wouldn’t have.

               Nothing stung like the truth, Ironhide had learned that the hard way early. Waspinator flinched. He hesitated. He was thinking it over.

               And then he wasn’t.

               Ironhide saw it coming, his plating morphed and hardened from orange to silver before Waspinator could land the shot and it bounced off his alloy like light from a laser pointer. This time Wasp was fighting in earnest, with every weapon his mutation had granted him – thorned claws, heavy frame, stingers long reformatted into static blasts, and an insect mode as massive and dangerous as any Decepticon. There was no training behind his moves, there was no knowledge or skill or strategies, only the strength that came with his bestial frame. It made him manageable. It made him easier to throw off, and counter, and deflect than Wasp ever had been back in camp when they’d both been learning.In raw power Waspinator had become overwhelming, but in endurance Ironhide had never met his equal. So he let Wasp fight it out. All of that anger, the fear, the betrayal, the aggression that had built itself up over vorns of imprisonment and animosity; it had to go somewhere.

               Because Wasp hadn’t always been a criminal and a convict, and he definitely hadn’t been the unstable snarling monster he’d become. There was more to him than that. Ironhide had known it, no one else had taken the time to figure it out. Not once the charges had been lain.

               Jazz and Optimus each commed in again once offering backup, but neither of them needed it. In the moment, Ironhide was enough for Waspinator; anything else would have been a distraction.

               The fact was that it wasn’t fair. It had never been fair, not when Wasp had been the Decepticon spy who used him for an idiot and tricked the entire platoon, and certainly not now. Ironhide had trusted the lies and abandoned Wasp when he’d needed him the most, that was fact too. Recognizing it wouldn’t change anything. At the time he’d been angry, and he’d been hurt, and somewhere in the depths of the stockades Wasp had felt it even more. There was nothing he could do to fix the past and Ironhide wasn’t going to try, but he could at least give Wasp a good fight. That’s what it was. Every scratch, every bite, every push and scrabble against impervious alloy was just another outlet. A chance to blow off much needed steam and drain that bubbling, endless rage that ebbed and shuddered with every frantic pull of Wasp’s transmutated frame. Once upon a time they used to spar for the same reasons – like washing off the frustration after a long day.

               Admittedly the stakes were a little higher this time.

               At one point Wasp pinned Ironhide down again and had to have one of his vestigial arms twisted backwards at an ugly angle before he’d relent, at another he’d tackled him so hard that they’d both dug long grooves into the asphalt below them when they finally hit the ground again. Waspinator’s arm had popped clean off again with that one – which was more of a blessing than Ironhide was gonna admit when he got back to base. He wasn’t weak.

               Wasp fought like he’d never fight again, he fought like he was scared of what would happen if he stopped. Eventually he had to anyways, his frame was unstable and his systems already damaged from the previous tussle in the city, but it wasn’t until his plating was torn and his energon lines were cracked and bleeding from where he’d busted them open in his fervor that Wasp finally shoved Ironhide away one last time and collapsed to a twisted huddle on the ground.

               For a long time there was nothing but the sound of their heavy ventilations and overworked cooling fans, coupled by the rapid buzzing of Wasp’s wings as he tried to expel the excess heat from his frame in the only way he was able. Ironhide pushed himself back up to a stand first, finally allowing his armour to dissipate from silver back to its orange and grey. Error reports of overworked defense systems leapt to the forefront almost immediately, but they went ignored in favour of pulling the more battered of his shoulders back into line with a forward stretch. He grabbed the nearest one of Wasp’s wayward arms before sitting down again beside the mech and passed it over.

               “Feelin’ any better?”

               Waspinator growled, he shifted his mandibles in a twitching pattern and grabbed the proffered appendage in one of his remaining servos just to rest his helm against the palm of his detached limb with optics closed. It would have been something of a macabre parody if it wasn’t so unsettling to see. If there hadn’t been quite so many open sockets exposing his skeletal frame just waiting to be popped back into place. He really _was_ falling apart at the seams.

               But that was just another fact now, just another truth they had to accept and work past, at least until they could get him back to Cybertron. Waspinator wasn’t moving to defend or attack and he wasn’t making a sound, so Ironhide tapped the space between them amiably and spoke the truth.

               “I’m not gonna leave you Wasp.”

               “Waspinator.” His voice was still a heavy and splintered rumble through his vocaliser, but the anger in it had broken. “Ironhide already left Wasp.” When he lifted his head again it was with a hard glare. His optics were cold. “Remember?”

               Ironhide didn’t break contact with those purple optics, not even when filmy, translucent shutters wiped solvent over them in a distorted version of a blink. Another feature of the mutation no doubt.

Sooner or later each new organic system would stop surprising him. “Well I’m not leaving you again.” He promised. “An’ I’m sorry.”

He was.

               “Sorry.” The word clunked against Waspinator’s thick glossa like he’d never said it before. He blinked again slowly and it didn’t look natural even for the organic he’d been crossed with. “Doesn’t take it back. Doesn’t make it better.”

               It usually didn’t. Ironhide shrugged his shoulders where he sat and counted the throbs of pain that pulsed through them. “Might make you feel better.”

               For a moment, and only a moment, there was something deeper in Wasp’s optics again, something that had been there when he’d been fighting, and when he’d been screaming and scared; it was something bright and deep and desperate. It clouded over again within nanokliks and again Wasp’s optics said nothing, set cold and hard like a criminal’s. With a wide arc of his arm and a sickening deep-set snap Waspinator shoved the joint of his shoulder back into its socket. He rose to unsteady pedes to locate the second one. His optics didn’t lighten.

               “Waspinator feels nothing.”

               Ironhide almost wished he didn’t either, but then they both would have been lying.  

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea. I honestly have no idea, but I do know that I really really wanted to write this. It doesn't feel finished, but that's probably because it's not for them either.  
> I've always wondered if the writers would have touched upon the fact that Wasp and Ironhide were friends in boot camp in fourth season, given that Ironhide was to become a primary character (with a sweeeeet earth alt-mode) and Waspinator was destined to return (as a huge hulking monster). Somehow I doubt it, but I don't really blame them because its a messy subject. I mean you don't even know that they'd recognize each other. 
> 
> Anyways, I think I fumbled this a lot, but it was a really hard angle to write. Oh well. Maybe i'll do better next time or next installment if i wish to continue. Which I might. 
> 
> Oh also, wasps don't have eyelids, that is a mutation with his old windshield wipers. Techno-organics amirite?


End file.
